WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Thus it was that Hazel, a valued employee of WLT despite her clutter of memorabilia (to which Wendell added a photo of himself signed, “Best Wishes to a Real Big Talent”), collapsed, emotionally shattered, and went home to Mankato to walk around and weep for a month. When she returned, she was a shadow of herself, a faint, tremulous, apologetic lady instead of the hearty office girl of yore. One day she sobbed out the whole awful story to Winifred Winter, the boss of Continuity, and Winifred went to Roy Jr., and Roy Jr. hit the roof. He was still angry after he changed the time of the show and sent Wendell off to buy an extra alarm clock.

  Roy Jr. paced around his office for a minute or two, kicking chairs and balling up paper and hurling it at the walls, and when Frank didn’t hear any more kicking, he poked his head in.

  Roy Jr. peered at him through narrowed slits. “I’m going to put him in your charge.”

  Frank eased into the room. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Take him and his sorry brothers and their wretched band and take them out of here. Out of our lives. And take Slim Graves too. And take Barney, that whiny engineer. And that drummer, Red, the one who goes around here always tapping on things. Run the whole damn bunch out the door and take them on a three-week tour of Minnesota and let’s get them out of the radio business once and for all. Except you. You come back.”

  “It’s December,” Frank pleaded. “Couldn’t this wait until after Christmas?”

  “I’m calling the Artists Bureau and I’m getting the whole bunch of them out of here and on the road starting tomorrow morning at 6 a.m.”

  Frank stood up, stunned. “Why me?” he asked.

  Roy Jr. put his arm around Frank’s shoulder. “I want them to suffer a little but I don’t want them to die in a ditch and I don’t want them going through Lyons County raping and pillaging. You’re going to see to it. You’re going to save them from themselves.”

  He sat down and pulled out a drawer and fetched a roll of cash out of a jar. “You’re going to do this for me,” he said, “and when you come back, I’m going to do something for you. Something wonderful. Meanwhile, here’s $800 expense money. For emergencies. Let Elmer pay the day-to-day stuff. If you need more, wire for it.”

  Frank asked if Reverend Odom could come. Roy Jr. said, “Of course.”

  “Can Maria come?” asked Frank. “She can sing.” Roy Jr. pursed his lips.

  “It’s a way of giving a little more variety to the show. She isn’t a gospel singer. She could sing stuff like ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ and ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ ”

  “I don’t know,” said Roy Jr. and Frank grinned. “I don’t know” was an affirmative, coming from Roy Jr. Now all he had to do was convince Maria.

  CHAPTER 33

  Big Chance

  The first stop on the tour, said Harry of the Artists Bureau, would be Roseau, seven hours north of Minneapolis, at 6 a.m. the next morning. The Shepherd Boys were singing that night at a Baptist church in Roseville. Frank arranged with Red, the bus driver and drummer, to get the Shepherd Boys’ old bus from the garage in Brooklyn Park where it sat rusting, to put two new tires on it and stock it with groceries, and to pick the Shepherds up at 9 p.m. Al Shepherd said that, with encores and offering and all, they might not be out before ten. So it might be a hard night of driving. And they had to pick up Slim at the Five Corners Bar on Cedar Avenue before 9, before he could do too much damage to himself.

  Maria had gone straight home after Golden Days, said Ethel. “She said she was pooped and for nobody to call her.” Frank dialed the number and after six rings Maria answered.

  “I’ll come right to the point,” he said. “I’m in love with you and I want to marry you. But before you say yes—I’m taking a show on the road for a couple weeks or so, and I wish you’d come with me. I want to be with you more than anything else. It’d be a hard trip, not a vacation, two weeks, a lot of driving and bad hotels and bad food and the show isn’t Duke Ellington. It isn’t even the Norsky Orchestra. But it’d be the greatest two weeks if you were with me. Do you want more time to think about it?”

  “Frank,” she said, “you shouldn’t ask a girl to marry you on the telephone. You’re supposed to come over and kneel down and clutch at my ankles.”

  He let his breath out. “I don’t have time to come over.”

  “What show is it? The Barn Dance?”

  “The Rise and Shine Show.”

  She laughed. “With The Shepherd Boys? The jerks with the hair?”

  “One and the same.”

  She screeched. “We’d go on a two-week honeymoon with a gospel quartet in a bus? And get up at six o’clock in the morning? I can’t even talk that early. Honey, if you saw me at six o’clock in the morning for two weeks, you’d never want to see me again. Sweetie, I can’t do it.”

  She was silent for a moment. He could hear her breathing. He wished she were breathing on his shoulder, her hair in his ear, kissing him on the neck. She said, “I meant to tell you this before but I only found out yesterday. Merle is coming up from Chicago. His sister lives here and he’s going to stay with her and he asked me to go out with him a couple evenings and I said yes.”

  She said, “I know that hurts your feelings, and I’m sorry, Frank. You’re the sweetest man who ever was and I don’t want to ever cause you an instant of pain, but I have to think about Merle too.”

  Now Frank had almost gotten his breath back after it was knocked out of him. Still, there was nothing to say, except Please come with me, please, and I will make it be wonderful, oh yes, I will make your life happy forever and ever, and he couldn’t say it.

  “Well, it’s up to you,” he said.

  “I think you would like Merle if you ever met him,” she said, vaguely. “He’s smart. He’s very funny.”

  I hope his train crashes and falls into Lake Pepin.

  “Oh. What’s he up to these days?”

  “He’s trying out for a road show called Yippee-Ay that he’d like me to try out for, too. A big musical revue with dancers and trapeze acts and elephants, and he said they have a small speaking role that’d be perfect for me, the part of a Chinese girl, but I’d have to ride an elephant and be in this number where you hang by your ankle fifty feet in the air and a guy twirls you for awhile. But I guess I could do it.”

  Frank was neatly tearing an envelope into squares and arranging them in facing rows, like houses. Why was she telling him this? The less he heard about Merle, the better. He wanted Merle to be swallowed up by the earth. On the other hand-maybe-she had to tell him because he was the only one who could talk her out of this Merle foolishness and get her to see what she already knew but couldn’t bring herself to say, which was that she loved him. Loved Frank. Listen.

  “How long would you be gone with this show?” he asked softly. The thought of Maria gone, his evenings vacant, his arms hanging by his sides.

  “I don’t know. Six months probably. I don’t know if I can do it or not. It’s so long. Of course it would be fun to see Merle again. He was the first person in theater who ever thought I was good. He helped me with everything. I have learned so much from him.”

  Frank’s hand hung over the houses, the shadow of the tip of his index finger touching the exact center of the block, and then swept them off the table with one stroke and they fluttered down—the exquisite pain of those soft sentences! Hearing her speak warmly of Merle was a knife in his side, and he wanted to yell at her to get the hell out, go, find Merle, leave me alone, Do what you wanted to do all along, You never fooled me for a minute, You were only playing me along, well, I was playing you too, you mean nothing to me, go, but then the word rang like a gong in his head: listen. Listen.

  She sighed. “I’ve never been this confused,” she said. “I like you a lot, Frank. You’re sweet and you’re more level-headed than anybody I ever knew and you’re gentle and good and I have tender feelings when we’re together. Maybe that’s the same as love, I don’t know. But-” Another exquisite sigh.


  And then, two sighs later, she said that her biggest dream was that the Majestic Theater in Chicago would call up and offer her a decent role in a real play. Ibsen or Shakespeare. She would give anything for that. “I’m twenty-one!” she moaned. “I haven’t done anything yet!” Merle knew people at the Majestic.

  Frank said, “I want to marry you, but there’s no reason to rush into something you’re not sure about.”

  “The first time I went to Chicago, I was seventeen, I ran away from my father,” she said. “When I got off the train, I had two dollars and a suitcase with all my books in it. I walked west, away from the Loop, looking for a cheap hotel—but a really nice one, you know? I hiked for about eighteen miles down streets of pawnshops and bowling alleys and taverns, streets where I thought I might need to suddenly start running very fast, but I was tired from carrying those books. Finally, I put the suitcase down and sat on it. I couldn’t take another step. I said, dear God, if you send me a policeman, I will never do another unkind thing the rest of my life. A man came out of a grocery store and locked the door and saw me and came over and asked what was wrong. He asked me if I was in trouble. Yes, I said, and he drove me to a home for unwed mothers. They gave me a bed and in the morning I went to a class on Bathing the Baby. So I know all about that.”

  “Well,” Frank said, “it’s good he wasn’t a policeman.”

  “When will I see you?” she asked.

  He said, “In two or three weeks.”

  When they said goodbye, Frank went to the bedroom and packed his grip. He squeezed in ten pairs of socks, six boxer shorts, six undershirts, three corduroy trousers, a wool shirt and three show shirts, a red plaid tie, and his shaving bag, and then the phone rang.

  It was Maria, weeping. “Don’t leave me,” she said.

  “I’m coming back.”

  “Please don’t leave me.” She said that no, she would not go tour America with Merle and ride elephants with hair like sewing needles and be twirled by the ankle by a roustabout and hang there with her breasts falling out of her bodice-no, she would stay at WLT and play small parts and hope for something good to come along. She would write to him. She would wait for him.

  He would be back in a few weeks. Maybe he would come and live with her, or maybe she would go to Chicago with him. Maybe it would be a vacation. Maybe for good. That was how they left it.

  CHAPTER 34

  Drunks

  Red picked up Reverend Odom and Frank in the bus at the Antwerp at 7 p. m. and they swung up to the Baptist church to get the Shepherds’ clothes out of Al’s trunk, planning afterward to pick up Slim and then back to church at ten for the boys. But the boys didn’t have their clothes packed. Al did but he’d left his at home. The boys were all sitting in Rudy’s livid Pontiac, laughing and eating fried chicken out of a brown sack, and passing another brown sack around, a small one. When Rudy rolled the window down, his eyes didn’t focus on Frank at all. “We’ll be there when you need us!” he yelled. “Don’ worry!” Wendell was sprawled on the passenger side with his head against the window; he looked as if someone had whacked him with a baseball bat. “Grab me some suits outta my closet, wouldja? You know where I live. 12-B. The back door’s unlocked. Just don’t let the dog out, okay? Grab me a couple of the show suits and some cowboy shirts and some string ties and underwear and—well, you know.”

  “We gotta be in Roseau at five tomorrow morning,” Frank said, peering into the back seat.

  “Never missed a show! Never! Ask Odom. He knows,” said Elmer. “Nobody ever accused a Shepherd of blowing a gig! You get the clothes, we’ll do the shows!” They all laughed.

  “They’re drunk!” said Frank, climbing back on the bus.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Reverend Odom.

  “It doesn’t bother you to see that?”

  “See what?”

  Frank scowled. “A bunch of gospel singers going into church fried out of their minds?”

  Reverend Odom shook his head. “It takes more than a few Everclears to make a North Dakotan lose his mind, son. The Shepherd Boys always could hold their alcohol.”

  “What is an Everclear?” asked Frank.

  “An Everclear is pure alcohol. So pure you feel it evaporating as it goes down. No frills, no coloring, no anise or juniper flavoring, no little olive or twist of lemon, no fruit. Everclear has but one purpose. It is the rocket ship of the barroom. Leaves no evidence on the breath. It’s the preferred beverage of gospel singers.”

  The bus swung around the block and headed back to the Antwerp.

  “You sure don’t talk like a minister sometimes,” said Frank.

  The Reverend bristled. “As a minister, I resent the hell out of that. Just because I know something about the world doesn’t mean I—I mean—you don’t have to be dumb to be good, you know. It helps but it’s not a requirement. Besides, I go way back with the Shepherd Boys. I know them too well to ever be disgusted with them. And there’s nothing they could do that I haven’t done twice myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Frank. “But why do they have to drink?”

  “They come from North Dakota, from a little town called Stacy,” said the Reverend. “Out on the prairie, where the wind blows all the time and the trees grow up bent and the idea of civilization is a hundred years too late. Everybody who stays in Stacy winds up being exactly like their mother and dad except a little worse. From November to May you feel as if you’re living on the moon, and in January, nature makes a serious attempt to kill you, so religion is sort of an occasional hobby compared to people’s faith in gin and bourbon. I know. My brother used to pastor a church east of there, Zion Lutheran. The Shepherd boys attended their parents’ church, known as The Church of the Perfect Gospel, a little fundamentalist bunch that believed that God tolerates no sin or error, so these people spent six years erecting a church edifice and then discovered the front door hung three-quarters of an inch off. This was due to wind, of course, but it was a test of faith for them, and some of them left to form a new church, based on the faith that God tolerates variation, a rented church, and some stayed to keep building the Perfect Church, and the Shepherd boys stayed but they also learned to like whiskey. And whiskey inspired them to sing gospel music.

  “Forgive me if I am too frank. There were six of them then, the four Shepherds, Wendell Shepherd’s girlfriend Alice Hammer, and her brother Raymond, and every Sunday night after church, they went to East Grand Forks and drove up and down Main Street, drinking whiskey and thinking about sex and singing gospel songs. The ratio was definitely against them. Raymond and Alice went to Zion Lutheran, my brother’s church, and being fundamentalist, the Shepherds thought of Lutherans as morally loose. So Wendell kept after Alice and they had a little bit of sex, or what seemed to them like sex, and the four boys in the front seat sang ‘Almost Persuaded.’ They got a good sound off the windshield, and sounded wonderful except that Raymond couldn’t carry a tune in a paper sack. They needed Wendell in the front seat singing, but he was busy in the back with Alice, and besides it was Raymond’s car.”

  Reverend Odom stopped. “This is too long a story,” he said. He looked out the window at a factory cruising by. “Where are we?”

  “Northeast Broadway,” said Frank. “Continue.”

  “Then one day Elmer Shepherd heard about the WLT Golden Gospel Quartet Tournament taking place in a few weeks at Bathsheba Bible College in Minneapolis. Bathsheba was famous among church kids as the Bible school that put the fun into fundamentalism. Bathsheba believed that a Christian who married a non-believer was lost, so they did what they could to challenge Christian young people to mate. They put boys and girls in close proximity, put a wall between them to build up interest, locked the doors, installed chaperones, gave lectures on Sex—Lust —Concupiscence—Carnal Knowledge—the Desires of the Flesh. . . . After a few weeks of that, a boy could hardly bear to cross his legs.

  “Winning the WLT Tournament was going to be the Shepherds’ one-way ticket ou
t of Stacy, but first they had to get rid of Raymond. They didn’t know how to tell him. Raymond dearly loved to sing. You couldn’t find anybody who sang worse and enjoyed it more. Then one Saturday night, a few miles west of town, his car missed a curve and crashed into a tree and he was killed. Only three curves in the county, and only one with a tree near it, so it seemed to be God’s will, all right. He hit it dead center at 90 m.p.h. A few days later he was reconstructed and laid out in a $150 mahogany coffin dressed in a new blue suit and looking nicer than he ever looked in his life, his skin problem finally cleared up. I know, because I was visiting my brother, and he officiated at the funeral and I played the organ.

  “So this was the Shepherds’ debut as a quartet, with Wendell singing lead. They shuffled in, sniffling, and Wendell said to me, ‘You know “Rock of Ages” in C?’ and I didn’t, so they did ‘Just as I Am,’ ‘How Beautiful Heaven Must Be,’ and ‘The Land Where We’ll Never Grow Old.’ They were pretty broken up about Raymond, and yet—they sounded good. My brother said that Raymond’s death left a hole in all their lives that could never be filled, which may have been true, but on the other hand, life is full of holes. At the end of ‘The Land Where We’ll Never Grow Old,’ as my brother began the benediction, Al leaned over to Rudy and said, ‘Shit, we’re better’n ever.’ ”